supersax harmony

[Koutetsu]

What are the general writing rules for 5 part harmonies, for a sax section in particular.

I am aware that first alto plays the melody, and the bari pretty much plays the melody, but an octave lower.

[gary]

Fairly straight ahead.

Voice from the melody down using the chord tones.
Substitute the 9th for the root.
Normally there is no doubling (except for the melody) of chord tones because the chords usually have more than four and five tones.

- closed voicing is as above. Usually the Bari doubles the lead.
- drop-two voicing. If the range is too high for the tenors and bari in closed voicing, drop the second voice down an octave.
- drop-two and four. If you want a large spread, and have room for it, drop the second and fourth voices an octave.

Once you get used to these voicings, you can experiment with doublings of tones, leaving some chord tones out, etc. but I wouldn't mess with that for a while.

As a general rule, the most important tones are -in this order- the third, seventh, extensions, altered tones. If the chord is an augmented, then the raised fifth is important.

You also need to pay attention to the voicing of the passing tones. Options are diatonic passing tones, chromatic approach notes, diminished passing notes and secondary dominant passing tones.

[Koutetsu]

I think I get it. I'll play around with it tomorrow on finale, plug in a simple melody, and export it as a midi so you can check my work.

thanks for the help.

[Koutetsu]

Started out in finale with 5 voices (easier the first time to do it without transposing), did a basic I vi ii V I

First 2 measures is with non-harmonic tones, I'm not too sure on those. The last part is just the skeleton (before passing tones, etc).

I'm wondering if I should treat each chord as a seventh (or ninth) when writing, or if I should just use the triads (excepting the V, which would make sense to be a dominant).

www.smnwband.org/5harmony.MID

let me know if something isn't sounding correctly.